Lesson 1: Words as vectors: teaching word2vec what "battery" means
22 min read·14 Oct 2026
Module 6 · Lesson 1 · About 45 minutes · Needs: basic Python; Module 4 Lesson 2 (TF-IDF and cosine similarity) helps but is not required
The situation
It is Monday 12 October 2026, project week 6. Rosa wants a help-centre search for Ines: she types a few words and the right article comes up while she replies.
Ines tries the word-count search from Module 4 with the query "battery". "the charger on my volt is flimsy" scores 0: it shares no word with the query. To word counts, "battery" and "charger" are as unrelated as "battery" and "chain". This lesson gives each word a short list of numbers, learned from text, so that related words end up close.